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Prawnverse part 15
The soup doesn't kill him, doesn't really fix him, but it puts him to sleep, which seems like a good compromise. At half eight Bitte checks her watch and stands up from the kitchen table, where she's been reading Trakl in silence for the last two hours.
"Time for work," she says. Spike rolls his head sideways on the couch and looks at her. "No."
"I didn't bloody ask you anything."
"No, I won't tell Texas you're sick." She tucks Trakl into the pocket of her coat and shrugs it on. "Go kiss the boy good-night and then we go." Just enough sweetness in her tone that he knows she's mocking him.
"You need a decent shag," he tells her, heaving himself to his feet. "My condolences to the bloke who does it."
"Because I turned you down, yes. Five times, now? Six?"
Six, but not recently. He gives her a sour look and considers just leaving without checking on Xander. Now that she's said it, he feels like a ponce doing it. But she's clearly expecting it, probably ready to smack him in the head again if he doesn't, so he scowls and tromps back down the hall like a child sent on an errand.
Xander's room is quiet. No squeaking, no shivering. Just long, slow breaths and the smell of faded sweat and nettles. Spike steps around the door and peers through the darkness. He's lying on his back with one arm flung out, the other folded across his chest like an orator, the fingers loose. His face is drained and peaceful. Bitte's a genius. And she said to kiss the kid, so on the off chance it actually matters... He takes a silent step over to the side of the cot, crouches down, and breathes in the warm fug of sleep.
"Going to work," he says quietly. "See you later." Xander doesn't move. His lips are apart, his eyelids flickering. Spike touches his mouth lightly to Xander's cheek. His skin is still hot, the blood still fighting with itself just under the surface. Fascinating, really. He could sit here hours, breathing it in.
In the living room, Bitte starts to hum the theme to Love Story. Cunt.
He stands up fast and stalks out, grabs the duster and his keys, and yanks the door open. She's innocent, a pixie, blinking up at him with guileless blue eyes as she walks under his arm.
"Also, you should speak to him about the little magic he has in there."
"What-?" He stands holding the door, staring after her. She smirks and starts down the hall to the staircase, floating bleak, incomprehensible German poetry back over her shoulder.
He tells Texas that Xander's sick, no, not hung over, really sick, but he'll be back in a day or two. Texas gives him a long look and says nothing, and Spike walks away with the back of his neck prickling over. Maybe Texas already knows about the two days away. Texas always seems to know everything. Fuck Texas. None of his business anyway.
It's Wednesday, slow night, and he stands at the door smoking, watching the stars, feeling the bass beat thump up through the soles of his feet from the dance pit downstairs. Thinking whether he should call home on his break to check in, or whether that'll just wake the kid up, and then realizing with a kind of dull shock that he's actually thinking about calling home for someone. Not just someone. Harris.
It should be an appalling thought, but once he gets over the fact that he's had it, he finds he's not appalled. The last two days, alone in the flat, were rotten. He likes having the kid there. Likes having him sit on the floor by the couch to watch television, likes letting a hand fall down to touch his head. Likes having him fill the fridge with juice and bread and stupid, normal things. Likes having him, period. In a lot of ways.
He drops his head to light a cigarette, smiling to himself, and realizes a couple of seconds too late that someone's appeared in front of him. Someone small, and like an idiot he automatically thinks of Xander's little brown-haired tart, even though she could never get within fifty feet of him like that.
The cigarette's out of his mouth, plucked neatly like a hair. Then it's being ground into the back of his hand, and he yelps and falls back against the door.
"Spike." Oh, fuck. "Long time, no stake."
"Slayer," he says, picking himself up and finding that actually, there's a stake there right now. Right against his chest. He goes still.
Been a couple of years since he's seen her, and part of his brain can't help but notice that she's grown into herself a little since then. She's leaner, firmer, not as blonde. She looks good. She smells like citrus perfume and someone else's ashes. And she's pressing the stake into his chest, hard enough to make his flesh dimple under his shirt.
"Ow," he says, reaching up with one finger to edge the point a little to the right. She digs it in harder. "Soul, remember? And where the hell did you come from?"
"You're slipping," she says grimly. "So here's the deal, Spike. I'm going to ask you a question, and you're going to answer it. And if you get all truth-is-relative with me, your boss is going to need one of his other door apes to sweep you up. Okay?"
"Got a bloody soul—" he says, twisting to see if anyone else—Vincent, another bouncer, anyone—is around. Buffy grabs him by the throat and rams him up against the door again. Hard. Where is everyone? "Okay."
"Have you seen Xander?"
He knew it, the second he realized who was burning him—he knew that was why she was here. Didn't know why now, or how she'd found him, or how much she already knew. But he knew it was about Xander. And he knows she's serious about dusting him. More than serious; she wants to. He can see it in her face, the need for an excuse and violence and loose ends neatly tied up.
"Xander," he says, as if trying to get his head around the question. "Harris. No."
The stake doesn't move. She keeps a hand around his throat and they just look at each other. There are lines around her eyes, he sees now. She looks a bit tired. Bit strung out. Bit like someone who's been asking questions over and over, walking wider and wider circles, for months on end.
He lets his eyes fall just a bit, to the stake, then lifts them back to hers. "No," he says again. "I haven't seen him. All right?" He lifts the finger again and pushes gently at the tip of the stake.
He's been lying a hundred something years now. Buffy's...what, nineteen? Kids these days. They think they know it all.
Slowly the stake leaves his chest, though she keeps her eyes on his face as if she thinks he's going to suddenly break, blurt something out, betray himself with a grimace or twitching lid. He watches her in return, until the stake's down at her side, almost out of sight. Then he reaches carefully into his pocket for another cigarette.
"So." He lights it, blows the smoke to the side, then belatedly offers her the packet. She gives it a disgusted look. "Lacking a lackey, are you?"
"Spike, you-" She seems overwhelmed suddenly, too angry to speak. Then he realizes her eyes are full, and that she's actually fighting not to cry. He tries to take a step back, but he's already up against the wall. "You..." She shoves the stake into her pocket, heels her hands over her eyes, and stands staring up at the sky for a second. "You're a bouncer."
"Uh." He doesn't have a handkerchief, and even if he did, he's not sure he'd want to offer it to the Slayer. Seems wrong, somehow. "Yeah, right. I am."
"God." She sniffs, shakes her hands out, and fixes him with a hard look. "You haven't heard anything about him? Nobody's said he was in town?"
"Xander? No. Thought he was in Sunnyhell with the rest of you lot, playing moving target."
"He was. He left."
"Why?" He takes a drag on his cigarette and watches her carefully through the smoke. Only natural to be curious, doesn't mean he's hiding anything. The trick is, you have to believe, yourself, whatever you're telling the twit in front of you. She's still eyeing him, checking for cracks.
"We tracked him this far, we know he's here. Or...he was a couple of nights ago. Willow has a spell, it hasn't been working but the last couple of nights something came through, and it said he was here."
"Here," he repeats, thinking fast. The nights Xander wasn't home, wasn't in the flat. "What, in the city?"
"No, here on this planet, Spike."
"Could have hopped a bus to anywhere, love. That's what people do."
"He's here," she repeats, not because she knows but because she wants to know. "You must hear things, Spike. He's a Scooby, if he was here people would talk. Demons. Would talk. You'd hear."
"And I haven't heard. Maybe Red's spell is having you on."
"Spike. Please." She's got water in her eyes again, and he has to stop himself from looking away or frowning. Last thing he needs is a Slayer weeping on his shoulder; that's the sort of thing Texas wouldn't overlook. "He's my friend. I need your help."
"Look, love," he says quietly. "Bygones are bygones, right? Hatchet's buried and all that. If I could help you, I swear on this fucking soul of mine, I would." He pauses, so she looks at him. "Haven't seen him, haven't heard anything about him. I'm sorry."
"But—" She stares at him with her mouth ajar, and he has to take it back, she doesn't look older. She looks sixteen years old and half-demolished. He has a moment of indecision.
Then he thinks of Xander in the kitchen, head down, eyes black and unreadable. I'm not calling them. They don't know where I am.
"If you do see him," she says, and then just seems to lose steam. They stand looking at each other, and he raises one eyebrow, waiting. "Tell him...just tell him we're not mad. Nobody's mad at him, we just want him home."
"What'd he do?"
Her face closes over again, as if she's just realized who she's talking to. "Nothing. It doesn't matter. If you see him and you don't get in touch with me, you'll—"
"Be a happy, fading memory for all my friends and business partners, yeah. I get it."
She wipes her nose, turns away, then hesitates and turns back. A little unwillingly. "How's...how's the job?"
"Fine."
There's a short silence, and she just stands there looking uncomfortable. He counts to five, then heaves an inward sigh and says, "Slaying going all right?"
"It's fine, thanks."
"Good, good."
Another silence, and then she shakes herself slightly, straightens up, and gives him a strained smile. "Okay, then. Well...bye."
"Bye. Oh—watch the step going down."
She puts her hands in her pockets and pushes down the steps past a couple of kobolds just coming up. One of them pauses and glances back after her, its eyes speculative.
"Oi," Spike says. "Newt. Up here now."
Nobody was mad at him, they just wanted him home.
Past closing, and he's sitting at the bar with four empty shot glasses at his elbow, smoking a cigarette down to the filter and staring vacantly through the blue lights reflected in the mirror. Behind him, the bussers are sweeping up, collecting the last glasses and ashtrays. Down at the other end, the bartender's swabbing the fixtures. Someone's put Foreigner on the sound system. Texas has odd taste in music.
Obviously, Xander did something. Something bad. And took off in the aftermath, found some way to keep Red from finding him, and what could have been so bad he'd rather suck cocks on street corners than own up to it? Spike taps his cigarette and turns a bottle cap over thoughtfully between finger and thumb. Didn't sound like anyone was dead, exactly.
"Buy a girl a drink," Bitte says, sitting down next to him. He glances at her, then slides his remaining shot over with the backs of his fingers. She takes it, sniffs it, gives him a sceptical look, and downs it in one. "Not bad," she says, rubbing a thumb over her teeth. "So, you love him?"
He's in a strange head space; he doesn't give her a dirty look, exactly. Just looks at her, most of his brain still puzzling over the question of what Xander could have done. She studies him for a few seconds, then lifts her arms and stretches. The flight membranes are pretty with the light shining through like that.
"I once was in love with a Piaf," she says, running her finger around inside the empty shot glass. "Pretty little human boy."
He drags on his cigarette, wonders if anyone's been maimed in Sunnydale, and then says, "Yeah?"
"He didn't mind me being..." She ripples her shoulders, pops up the musculature a bit. Shorthand. He nods. "I thought I might marry him, even."
"Really." He gives a bit of a laugh at that, ashing over the bar. "Marriage."
"Well, I was young. And then his family..." She rolls her eyes. "We would elope, go to Austria, maybe I would join the circus."
"Sounds like a plan."
"Yes, right. But then one night I went to meet him in the park, where I could fly a little, and—" She makes a vanishing gesture with both hands.
"Scarpered?"
"No, dead."
"Dead."
"Yes, it was very silly of us to meet in the park at night. I found him in a thicket with half his clothes off." She says it simply, without any emotion. He frowns, feeling the cigarette ember creep down almost to his fingers.
"What - mugged?"
She gives him a steady look, then turns and twitches two fingers at the bartender. When he looks up, she holds up the empty glass, and he nods.
"No," she says, looking back. "Dead, drained. Vampires."
He just sits there while the bartender brings another shot down and sets it in front of Bitte. She picks it up in her pale fingers and sips it delicately, like tea.
"You are dangerous people," she says after a while. "Does your Piaf know that?"
"Yeah."
"And do you know that?"
"Yeah. I know that."
"Well." She's finished the shot; she puts the glass carefully back down on the bar and shrugs. "Then it's none of my business, is it?"
He sits in silence, studying the nicotine stains that'll be off his fingers by the time he gets to the car. The music switches over to Toto, and Bitte winces. "Thanks for sewing my face up," he says finally.
"You had a visitor tonight. Does Texas know the Slayer was here?"
"Texas knows bloody everything."
"Yes, right. You should be careful, Spike. If you push him too far, he may not need a movie star on his door anymore. And then—" She smiles slightly. "Is there still a circus to join?"
"I'm careful." He puts his fists into the small of his back, straightens up, winces. Starts collecting his cigarettes and lighter, his duster off the stool beside him. Bitte watches him stand up, one finger still playing with an empty shot glass. He feels strangely small, standing in front of her. As if he could lean over and put his head on her knee and just rest like that for a while.
"Need a ride home?"
She shakes her head, and he nods, turns to go, then turns back. Without thinking about it, he reaches out and puts a hand on the nape of her neck. He can feel the little spikes down her spine, hard as rocks against his palm.
She tolerates it for a few seconds, then pops her muscles and pokes his hand off without even looking around.
